


The Long-Distance Call

by busaikko



Category: The Losers (2010)
Genre: M/M, Yuletide 2012
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 14:57:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/busaikko/pseuds/busaikko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cougar's been kidnapped.  Jensen has to find him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Long-Distance Call

**Author's Note:**

  * For [csi_sanders1129](https://archiveofourown.org/users/csi_sanders1129/gifts).



> Written for csi_sanders1129, who requested _Maybe something in which Cougar is in a life threatening situation and Jensen gets him out of it. Kind of like the sniper scene but backwards, only, you know, without snipers because it's Jensen. Slash would be nice, but gen is fine, too. Basically I just want Jensen to be the hero._
> 
> Warning: may be disturbing for anyone with claustrophobia
> 
> Many, many thanks to my fabulous beta, kisahawklin ♥

> It was a slow day  
>  And the sun was beating  
>  On the soldiers by the side of the road  
>  There was a bright light  
>  A shattering of shop windows  
>  The bomb in the baby carriage  
>  Was wired to the radio  
>  These are the days of miracle and wonder  
>  This is the long distance call  
> The Boy in the Bubble - Paul Simon  
> 

* * *

Cougar woke up to absolute darkness. His head hurt and he felt nauseous; dizzy, even though he was lying down. He blinked and turned his head, making sure he wasn't blindfolded, looking for any light. There wasn't much sound, either, aside from his heartbeat and breathing. His hands didn't want to cooperate at first, and it took a disturbing amount of effort to slowly coax them up to slide along the cold metal surface he was on. His fingers found walls disturbingly close, which rose to another metal plate over him, two hand-spans over his face. A box, he decided, pushing on the lid carefully, then harder, then with all the little strength he had. _Or maybe a coffin_. He rapped on the walls and roof. The sound was muffled, muted by something surrounding him. _A buried coffin._

He slowed his breathing, because he was not going to let fear take control, despite the way his mind flooded with horror stories from childhood: helpless people screaming until all their air was gone, or clawing at the walls until their fingers were torn down to the bone, or breaking through boards only to have cemetery dirt pour in. He scrubbed his hands over his face and thought about his parents, and reminded himself that he'd trained for situations like this. He kept concentrating on his breathing – deep even breaths – and on keeping his heart rate down, because those were things it was good to do. He wondered how long he'd been unconscious. He was given something to drink, he thought; someone had slapped duct tape over his mouth to keep him from spitting it out. He didn't remember the tape coming off. He let the memories come back slowly, while he patted himself down, checking for tools or weapons. They'd taken his boots and his belt – everything except his undershirt and jeans.

He was pissed about not having his hat. Losing his phone, though... Jensen, he thought, and allowed himself a smile in the darkness, would come down on them like a force of nature if they'd messed with his phone.

*

After the whole thing with Max, Jensen hadn't had a clue what Clay planned for his team to do. There had been some hush-hush meetings with people in the government and the military, and Jensen had figured that the odds favored the cover-up operation involving bullets through the heads of everyone on his team. He'd been cautiously pleased not to have to run in the middle of the night; he watched a lot of soccer games and trolled internet forums like there was, literally, no tomorrow.

But then Jolene put her foot down hard enough to make Clay jump, and it wasn't a week after that before he got Jensen and Cougar and Pooch together at his place and laid out his plan.

The US military, Clay said, had some very specific security problems. Systems that hadn't been updated or modernized, bloated computer programs with exploitable back doors, and a general failure of imagination.

"The bad guys," Clay had added, perched on his desk and swinging one foot absently, "have good imaginations."

"We're not in the Army any more," Pooch pointed out. He looked over to Cougar and Jensen, stuck in the Venus' flytrap of Clay's busted sofa. "They don't want us, we don't need them."

Clay picked up a folder off the desk, tapped it on his knee, and then handed it over. "Independent consulting company with a government contract wants us. It's... mostly a day job, with good medical benefits, and all we'd have to do is figure out where exploitable weaknesses are. And exploit the hell out of them."

Pooch was flipping through the pages, eyebrows thoughtfully high. Jensen figured he was the easiest sell. He was always talking about all the plans he had for Pooch Junior: private schools and advanced degrees, study abroad, rebuilding classic cars as a kind of cool father-son bonding thing. And Jensen knew from living with Anna and the world's most awesome niece, kids needed doctors and dentists and stuff.

Jensen wasn't sure, but he had a weakness for intriguing problems, and he'd bet good money that Clay already had a few lined up. Jensen-bait.

Cougar, now... Jensen honestly didn't know what he'd say. They didn't see that much of each other, post-Max and post-Aisha, but when their paths crossed it was just like old times, except better, because no one was trying to kill them. Jensen knew how to time a joke to make Cougar's mouth curl up in a smile, and Cougar would disappear into Anna's kitchen and cook the kinds of dinners that made Jensen propose marriage compulsively.

Cougar hadn't said no yet, so Jensen kept asking, and he figured he would until Cougar said yes to someone else. Jensen had kind of a crush. But this plan of Clay's, well, Jensen wasn't sure it was what Cougar wanted to do with his life.

But Pooch said yes, and so did Jensen, and Cougar nodded sideways in equanimous agreement. It was only after Jensen was home and breaking the news to Anna that it hit him, that maybe he'd been the Cougar-bait.

Clay was a bastard like that.

*

After years of training, Cougar's internal clock was excellent. He measured the passage of time with his body: his breaths, his heartbeat. He knew when he had been awake for half an hour, fifty minutes, one hour. He was less certain of how much time he'd lost. He guessed he'd been out for at least an hour, from the stiffness of his muscles and the faint pangs of hunger that made the roiling nausea even worse.

In its own way, that was comforting. The air wasn't turning stale; if the box he was in had been sealed, he'd be suffocating by now. His captors wanted him alive, and didn't trust him not to escape. He thought it was a bad sign that they had prepared a safe place with a buried, ventilated box. Maybe taking him wasn't personal, for them. Maybe they made their money by taking people, and handing them over to discreet buyers with bad intentions.

He pushed again on the lid to the box, putting his whole body into the effort this time. Again, nothing. Part of him recognized and acknowledged the fear; he accepted it and then put it away, letting his breathing slow back down to a gentle metronome, lowering his heart rate, relaxing.

He let himself replay what he remembered from their – he thought of it as a mission, but what it was was a job. A good-paying job, and one where he got to use his skills to shoot out cameras and lights, to disable vehicles, to create a distraction while the team broke into one insecure installation after another. He felt good about what they were doing. Two months ago they'd shown how easy it was to access the cesium-137 in a lab in Wyoming. The job they were working on now involved breaking military prisoners out during transport, which was why Cougar had been keeping watch from the roof of an airplane hangar. Jensen had been in the security office, uploading the program to switch the automated checkpoints to his laptop, and Cougar had waited eleven minutes until Clay gave the order to blow the back tires on the armored bus.

After watching the black rubber burst and shred through his rifle sight... that was when things became very confused in Cougar's memories. He remembered a flash like lightning and the blue sky falling down at him fast; now he put those memories together and came up with some kind of electric shock weapon. While he was still disoriented, hands had grabbed him up, drugged him, and taken him.... That was where the uncertainty kicked in. He thought he remembered movement, swaying, loud garbled voices. He had no idea where he'd been taken.

There wasn't much to do except wait, and hope that Jensen found him before his captors made a deal and handed him over.

He was pretty sure Jensen would. Jensen was his best friend who kept asking for Cougar's hand in marriage. The first time had been weird – Cougar didn't grow up around gay people, and he didn't have any gay friends in the Army, except for Jensen, who insisted that he wasn't gay, he was _gleeful_ – but it made Cougar feel good. He'd cook with Jensen hovering around, hear from the whole Jensen family how good the meal was, and then Jensen'd make him stay seated at the table, nursing his coffee and watching Jensen clean up. Jensen would talk so much that Cougar didn't mind talking back, sometimes. It reminded him of his house, his mother and father, their laughter in the kitchen making it the happiest place in his childhood. His mother kept telling him that she wanted him to get married and make a home. He wondered what she'd think of Jensen.

He wondered what _he_ thought about Jensen. He was stuck between a _no_ and a _yes_ , and had been for a while now. So he kept returning to Jensen's sister's house, and leaving again. But he still had faith that Jensen... was going to come for him.

He guessed that was more than a little messed up. Considering the circumstances, he forgave himself.

*

Jensen pulled on his emergency pair of vintage-eighties plastic framed glasses and peeled off the gray coveralls he'd been wearing in his disguise as random not-suspicious airport personnel. His new disguise was as a finder of lost Cougars, and for that he needed to be kickass on the inside and mild-mannered on the outside. Like Superman, hence the glasses.

"So you think you can track him by his phone?" Pooch asked, pacing and looking pissed off. He'd been the one to discover Cougar had been taken, and he'd taken responsibility for calling the job off. Clay had been pissed, because that meant a lot of paperwork, and he'd tried to imply that Cougar had just.. gone for donuts, or something.

Cougar's hat had been up on the roof, blown by the wind back up an A/C unit. Pooch had been stone-faced furious when he'd climbed down holding it.

Jensen'd been glad for Pooch's outrage, because it meant he could stick his own feelings in a box and concentrate on Cougar. He'd only been able to follow Cougar's phone to just beyond the Interstate, but that was a good enough start. After telling the US Marshall in charge of the day's exercise that they'd have to take a rain date because his team was fucked, Clay'd gone to retrieve the phone – he'd been appalled to hear how much it had cost. But Jensen had to assume it'd been tossed into the weeds, or under traffic. That's what he'd have done.

Jensen didn't know if the bad guys were feeding him misinformation, but his new job came with a few perks, like the ability to tap into military satellite feeds. He moved all his equipment into the car and used the satellite data to get eyes on the area, simultaneously collecting data from the electronic toll booths.

"Nope," Jensen said, and smiled viciously at his laptop. He hoped it knew that its continued digital existence depended on speedy results. "But a funny thing happens when Cougar and his phone get separated. Do you know what RFID is?"

Pooch paused while getting into the driver's seat, narrowing his eyes. "A cat chip." He struggled to hold his grin in. "A motherfucking _cat_ chip. Man, Cougar must _really_ like you if he's letting you cyborg his ass up."

"It's in his boots," Jensen said, distracted by his data. "Get Clay on the radio, tell him a late-model Cougar just went through lane five at the turnpike tollbooth, southbound." He drummed his fingers on the dashboard impatiently and whistled Bon Jovi until he got the footage from the security camera. "Tell him I'm sending a picture of the car now. Does he know how to open a photo on his phone?"

Pooch relayed the information and snapped his phone shut. "He says fuck you, by the way." He looked over, winced, and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. "We ready to hit the road?"

Jensen sighed and slouched down further, propping the laptop up on his knees. "Guess so."

"You didn't get a visual of the passengers?" Pooch asked, and then added, "Buckle up. It's the law."

"We don't know it's him." Jensen shrugged, pulling the seatbelt out in sharp annoyed jerks. "We could find the car and just his boots in the back. Whoever grabbed him knew what they were doing. I _own_ all the security cameras in this place and still didn't get one visual."

"Yeah, well," Pooch said, and turned onto the service road, flipping the clipboard with their passes up against the window. "You're not God."

"Take that back," Jensen muttered, chin pressed down against his chest. "They wouldn't take him if they wanted to kill him, right?"

Pooch was a good liar. His fake confidence sounded just like the real thing. "He'll be fine. You'll rush in like a knight in armor and return his hat, he'll bake you a fucking _cake_."

Jensen liked that image, especially if he got a big-ass sword. He didn't like the niggling uncertainty, or the intrusive thoughts about Cougar maybe being dead and the bad guys just looking for a good place to dump his body.

He twisted around just enough to check that the hat was still on the back seat. He could totally do this superhero rescuing shit, if he knew he had cake coming.

*

Cougar was getting tired of waiting. His ass was freezing, his mouth was dry, he didn't have enough room to roll over comfortably, and he didn't even want to think about what he'd do when he needed to piss. He was bored, and he knew that was dangerous. He needed to be able to draw on patience and readiness.

He needed to get out of this damn box.

*

Jensen sat up so fast his laptop slid into the footwell. "What do you mean you lost the car? I sent you a picture of the car. You were following the car. What you _don't_ do is lose the car."

He was vaguely aware that yelling at Clay was not a good thing to do, but he had to vent at _someone_.

"Exit 31 truck stop," Clay said. "I'll turn around as soon as I can – "

"On it," Jensen said, and hung up on him. He grabbed the computer up, hoping his mobile connection still held, because everything today couldn't go wrong, could it? "I'll be your military satellite _bitch_ if you just pretty, pretty please – " and yes, that was beautiful – "I am the _man_ ," he told Pooch, just in case he didn't know that.

"Word you're looking for is manic," Pooch shot back. "What've you got?"

"They're changing cars. Far end of a pretty busy parking area, two guys pulling another out of the back of that white Toyota, moving him to a dark-colored SUV. One guy drives the Toyota off and the new car – crap, I can't get anything on it, they know to stay away from the cameras – how far out are we?"

"Just passed Exit 30," Pooch said. "You know it might not be him. How big's a person to the spy cams, about half as big as an ant?"

"SUV just pulled around to the back of the fast-food place and now my half-ant dude's getting out and throwing a bunch of stuff away." Jensen checked to make sure he was saving all this to video, and then started making a highlights reel to send to Clay. "In my book, that's pretty suspicious. Aw, _fuck_."

Pooch slid the car out of the fast lane. "We got an exit sign, what do you want me to do?"

"There's an access road and that's just where they're going, looks like it runs past the maintenance buildings and then right to scenic rural Somewhereville."

"Someone put some thought into this op," Pooch said, and flicked his turn signal on. "And if we weren't pesky kids they'd have got away with it, too."

"Aisha wouldn't do this to us," Jensen said, trying to sound sure. "Doesn't she babysit for you?"

Pooch snorted. "She's trying to convince Jolene to become a ninja or something. I fear for my life." He pulled off the highway and followed Jensen's directions through the parking area. Jensen made him get out and check the trash – he was the logical choice, because if Jensen got tangled up and dropped the computer, their only tenuous links to Cougar would be severed. Pooch grumbled, but when he came back he had an armful of familiar clothing and a pair of boots.

He tossed them in the trunk because they already stank of stale grease, and they both agreed that Cougar was going to be seriously pissed, and then Jensen texted Clay to let him know the new plan, and to make sure that Clay hadn't accidentally deleted the video file by mistake.

The big problem with driving along country backroads was that suddenly there was no place to hide, and Jensen really didn't want to be spotted. He kept his eyes glued to the satellite feed and made Pooch mad enough to spit, telling him to slow down, slow _more_ down, and slow the fuck down.

But Jensen was willing to take being yelled at because _yes_ , the SUV turned off the road just a couple miles short of the podunk town's main intersection, into what Jensen's map app told him was Apocalypse Self-Storage.

"You're messing with me," Pooch said when Jensen told him. "This is not the Bible Belt, and the hell kind of name is that anyway? Sixty bucks a month for a unit, guaranteed money back if the world ends?"

"Au contraire," Jensen said, trying to make sense of a text from Clay that used no capitals, spaces, or punctuation. "A five by five's only forty-five. There's an online coupon, and Clay wants us to wait for him. He says not to shoot anyone yet."

Pooch pulled over onto the shoulder. "You going to be able to tell if they try and pull a switcheroo on us?"

Jensen licked his lips. Waiting was not his style. "The car's inside, out of sight, so no, unless I secretly have psychic powers, not a clue."

Pooch sighed. "You think Clay's having some kind of midlife crisis? Seems like he's even more of a control freak now than he used to be."

Jensen was not going to say the name; he wasn't even going to think the name, and he saw the instant Pooch realized what – _who_ – they weren't talking about.

"Fuck," Pooch said, and cracked his neck. Then he sucked in a breath and said, "I tell you Jolene's got me putting quarters in a swearing jar at home?"

*

The noise from overhead sounded like muffled thunder, and Cougar felt alertness flood into him. He knew lashing out at his captors would be stupid and running would probably be fatal; he accepted that neither of those were good options. He was cold and stiff and still feeling kind of sick. His best chance for escape was to use his own weakness as a weapon. He closed his eyes and went limp, breathing like he was asleep. If his captors only saw someone groggy and disoriented, they might underestimate him.

Except the first voice he heard, after a series of echoing bumps overhead and the whole box jerking and rocking, sounded an awful lot like Clay saying "Holy _fuck_ , my back." There was another voice, also familiar, chanting a litany of _oh shit, oh shit_ , and then there was a loud rough grating sound and cold fresh air on his face, and Cougar had to open his eyes to make sure he wasn't hallucinating.

He stared right at Pooch, who grinned and reached down to tweak his toes. "Looks like these little piggies didn't quite make it to market."

Cougar sat up as fast as he could, and didn't even mind Jensen and Pooch's helping hands as they lifted him up and out. The metal box was set on the bottom of a grease pit, packed in with sandbags. The cover was a thick steel plate secured with padlocks that had been cut open; a chain and pulley system set in the ceiling had been used to crank it up to floor level, and Pooch kept one hand on Cougar's head so he didn't crack his skull on it. Once he was free they boosted him up into the garage, and he staggered to his feet even though his eyes were dazzled by the light from the open door and his body had leveled shivering up to swaying where he stood. Without saying anything, Jensen wrapped him up tight in his arms, Jensen's face pressed into his neck, ridiculous glasses digging into his shoulder.

Cougar didn't mind. Jensen was warm, and Cougar was starving for warmth.

"We should go," Clay said, hand pressed to his lower back and face twisted in a grimace. Cougar'd be more than happy to pay his chiropractic bills. Least he could do.

He looked down into the pit, and Jensen said, tense and unhappy, "Don't."

Pooch coughed, and jerked his head towards the outside. "Hat's in the car," he said, and Cougar just nodded. His team had his back, of course they had his hat. "The rest of your stuff needs some serious cleaning, though."

"And your phone got run over by a truck or two," Clay said. "Weren't enough big pieces to bother picking up. Jensen'll buy you a new one."

Cougar nodded and put a hand on Jensen's shoulder, patting gingerly, feeling like there were undercurrents that he didn't know how to interpret.

It wasn't until he was in the backseat and sipping cautiously at a bottled water that Pooch let it slip that there had been a bomb.

"We agreed not to talk about the omb-bay," Jensen said, looking pissed. He rummaged in the seat pocket and dug out a handful of snacks. "You want some Tic-Tacs? Doritos? Ding-Dong?"

Cougar took the Tic-Tacs. "You took care of it."

Jensen gave him a tense, unhappy little smile. "Course I did."

Which told Cougar that it had been a near thing. He'd nearly been blown to pieces, and Clay nearly had to pay a visit to his parents, dressed in a badly-fitting suit, and give them his hat. And Jensen would have worked on the bomb right up until it went up in his face, because... well. Cougar didn't figure Jensen would have given up, not even if Clay gave him a direct order.

"They parked a car right over you and rigged it with C4," Pooch said. "So if anyone opened the door...."

"I am seriously going to throw up if you keep talking about it," Jensen said, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

Cougar tipped some candy into his palm, ate two and offered Jensen the rest. Pooch clumsily changed the topic to movies, and Jensen argued with him about everything he said; Cougar tuned the words out and just paid attention to the comforting rhythm of the familiar noise surrounding him. He was still out of it when Pooch pulled the car into the parking lot of one of the big generic airport hotels, the kind Jensen called Best Comfort Quality Lodge Inn and Out Resorts, but Jensen wasn't joking now.

"Sure, Clay says it's okay," Jensen was saying. "But he could be wrong, he's been wrong before, and one of these days – "

"You know the kidnappers are toast, right?" Pooch said. He turned the engine off and twisted around, giving Cougar a reassuring grin. "There's a team tracking them, at the end of the day they're going to be in military custody and hopefully whoever hired them as well. We're not on our own. We've got good people at our back, watching our backs, now."

"There better be a jacuzzi in my room," Jensen said, dropping his head onto the seat back and staring up at the roof. He took off his glasses, folded them absently, and shoved them into the breast pocket of his shirt. "What a fucking day this been."

Cougar liked the idea of a jacuzzi, but he was coming down hard, so he didn't care that there was only a bath/shower combo in the room he was sharing with Jensen. The shower was pretty amazing, with enough hot water that he felt he might be able to get the chill out from where it'd lodged in his bones. He didn't close the door, and Jensen kept wandering in, checking on the towels and unwrapping the cups and complaining about the way the shampoo made the whole room stink like floral air freshener.

Cougar knew it'd take a while for Jensen to work through his restless energy. He could guess just how tightly Jensen had had to focus – from what he gathered, tracking him down had been mostly Jensen, and defusing the bomb, that had been Jensen, too. He expected Jensen to sleep like a rock. And wake up screaming.

His fingers were wrinkled by the time he decided that he was warm enough and got out, wrapping up in a towel to venture into the room in search of his clothes.

"Clay brought by some stuff for you," Jensen said, and waved at a plastic bag on the bed. "Your stuff's at the cleaners'." He moved toward the bathroom, not meeting Cougar's eyes. "I'm gonna – I smell like I bathed in eau de bomb disposal unit."

"I used up the hot water," Cougar said. He meant it as a joke, as an offering, but Jensen just nodded and looked grim.

"Good," Jensen said. He left the bathroom door cracked open, though. Cougar guessed that was a good thing.

Clay had bought two pairs of loose drawstring trousers, two t-shirts with pictures of sharks, and two hooded sweatshirts, one orange and one green. Cougar pulled on the green one and stretched out on the bed.

He liked having pillows and a mattress, he decided, and dozed a bit, watching the afternoon sunlight flicker along the curtains until Jensen came back.

"We have matching pajamas," he said. "You like orange, right?"

"It took forever to get the bomb defused," Jensen said, giving his shark shirt an incredulous look before pulling it over his head, tugging as it stuck to his damp skin. "And Pooch kept saying, take your time, go slow, do it right, and that was the right thing to do, you know? But I was... we got the door open, finally, took care of the bomb, moved the damn car, and there was no way you were still alive. I just knew, you'd been dying a slow bad death by suffocation the whole time, when we were like ten feet away, and that was what the bad guys wanted, me to have killed you...." His voice trailed off, and he shook out the trousers. "Clay forgot socks and underpants?"

Cougar shrugged and watched Jensen roll his eyes, drop the towel, and pull the trousers on.

"My eyes are up _here_ ," Jensen said, pointing. Cougar raised his eyebrows and let his gaze wander all the way up. By the time their eyes met, Jensen's were about as big as dinner plates. "They gave you the bad drugs, didn't they? Because you've had trauma before and it never turned you gay." He paused. "Did it?"

"They gave me something," Cougar admitted. "It wore off."

Jensen sighed and tossed his day-glo sweatshirt onto the desk. "That's what they all say. You should get some sleep."

Cougar pushed up on his elbow to look pointedly at the digital clock, which read five-thirty-eight.

"Then I'll buy you some nice softcore pay-for-porn, we'll order up nachos and beer, it'll be a real celebration of the American way."

Cougar rolled to his feet, curling his toes in the thick carpet as he caught his balance, and then crossed over to where Jensen was standing, not so much still as stricken.

"Don't know what I want," he said, moving into Jensen's space. "But I want it with you." And he leaned in. Kissing Jensen didn't feel weird, but he wanted Jensen to kiss back. "No?"

"I'm probably kind of a little in love with you," Jensen said. He sounded like that was a bad thing.

"Wouldn't be here if you weren't," Cougar pointed out, and Jensen shuddered. He put his hands on Jensen's arms, slid them around to his back a moment later. All the strength in Jensen's upper body was coiled in tension, and Cougar rubbed circles with his palms, trying to ease the strain some, looking for the right touch to convey what he felt.

"Pooch said you'd bake me a cake," Jensen said. He reached up and brushed his fingers through Cougar's still-damp hair, and Cougar found himself leaning into the touch. "You don't have to.... Cake is good."

"I _decided_ today." Cougar let an edge of sharpness show; he wasn't angry, but he wanted Jensen to listen. Jensen rolled his eyes, and Cougar pulled his right hand around to brush his thumb over the corner of Jensen's eye, his knuckles curling to rest on Jensen's cheek. "But this, with you, it goes back a long way." Just how far back, he didn't know, but the seeds were planted and the roots grown deep even before Cougar realized he wanted to make Jensen happy.

"I think about getting a kitchen of our own. A place of our own," Jensen said, his mouth twisting. "Barbecue in the backyard, my DVDs snuggling up with your CDs. You in my bed. But everyone thinks about nice stuff they can't have. I mean. It's human nature."

"Ask me," Cougar said, and rubbed his fingers over the bumps of Jensen's spine, feeling how Jensen was holding back. His other hand opened until he was cupping Jensen's cheek. Somehow, that felt even more decisive than a kiss.

Jensen didn't say anything long enough that Cougar started to wonder if the evening was going to end in nachos and beer and pretending they'd never had this conversation. He could do that. Even if he didn't want to.

Jensen sucked in a ragged breath. "You love me?"

"Yes," Cougar said, no hesitation, even though that wasn't one of the questions he had prepared an answer for; that wasn't what he'd thought Jensen would ask. That didn't make his answer untrue.

"Whoa," Jensen said, and his fingers tightened in Cougar's hair. This time Jensen kissed first and Cougar kissed back, just to show him how it was supposed to be done. They were comfortable together, Cougar decided; been through just about everything bad and good at each others' sides, and for a while now his definition of home was wherever Jensen was.

Cougar let his mouth slide to Jensen's jawline, then down his neck, grinning at the way that made Jensen start a dozen sentences that all broke off after two words. "I'll make you a cake anyway," he said against Jensen's skin, and that made Jensen laugh.

"I deserve it," Jensen said, and curled his hand around the back of Cougar's neck, under his hair. "I was awesome today," he added, and, "I like strawberry," and, "You can touch me anywhere," and, "Please don't die, okay?"

"Okay," Cougar agreed. He turned Jensen sideways with his hip, and nudged him back towards the bed.

t h e * e n d


End file.
